Committee for Skeptical Inquiry

[Barry Karr <SkeptInq@aol.com>]

1)  FOX  Moon landing Program
2)  Thank you for Participating in Paranormal Survey
3)  CSICOP News Release: NIH Funds Research into "Distant Healing" for 150
HIV Patients



1)  Phil Plait from the www.badastronomy.com website writes to tell us of his
review of the terrible FOX special (I can't believe I sat through most of it)

Hi again Barry-- I just put up my page against that atrocious
Fox program. Check out http://www.badastronomy.com; the link
is at the top!

Thanks,

Phil Plait
The Bad Astronomy Web Page: http://www.badastronomy.com

PS:  Phil will be speaking at the Center for Inquiry West in Los Angeles at
11:00am on March 18th.  Call  310 306 2847 for more information.


2)  Chris Wetzel wants to thank the more than 270 CSICOP list readers who
participated in his surveys. He also received many useful and insightful
comments
about the project from you. In this phase of the research, he does not
need a representative sample of respondents, so the bias caused by the
downloading software requirment is not as much a concern for him as it
was for you. The CSICOP data is combined with data from other skeptical
groups under the rubric "science" in the data graphs. He intends to
submit a manuscript focusing only on the CSICOP data (and its
relationship to other groups) to the Skeptical Inquirer.

He has put up a new version of the program which should eliminate
the formatting problems some of you encountered. If you return to the
webaddress-- http://psychexps.olemiss.edu/exps/researchexp/wetzel/para.htm --
make sure you click on the "reload" button so your browser won't access
the old version in its cache memory.

3) Skeptical Inquirer Press Release

For Immediate Release

CONTACT: Kevin Christopher
Phone: (716) 636-1425 ext. 224
Fax: (716) 636-1733
E-mail: kchristopher@centerforinquiry.net

NIH Funds Research into "Distant Healing" for 150 HIV Patients

Amherst, NY (February 20, 2000)-In the new March/April 2001 issue of
Skeptical Inquirer, Martin Gardner examines the "distant healing" claims of
Elisabeth Targ and highlights the National Institutes of Health's (NIH)
funding of her upcoming three-year study through its National Center for
Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). Targ directs the
Complementary Medicine Research Institute (CMRI), which is part of the
California Pacific Medical Center.

In a 1997 paper published in Alternative Therapies, Targ speculates that
healers can effect healing at a distance through "the agency of God,
consciousness, love, electrons, or a combination." She is the daughter of
parapsychologist Russell Targ-who in the 1970s claimed proofs of "remote
viewing" and Uri Geller's psychic abilities. In 1998 Elisabeth Targ
published a study in the Western Journal Of Medicine claiming that HIV
subjects who unknowingly received distant healing showed significantly
improvement over the control group. Her NCCAM-funded study will include 150
HIV patients and is intended to build clinical evidence for distant healing.

According to Gardner, the funding for the first year alone of Targ's
clinical trials is expected to reach $243,228 U.S and will likely amount to
more than 2 million dollars of federal funds over the next few years.
Judging by federal appropriations, Congress shows no skepticism of federally
funded alternative medicine research. According to a December 2000 AAAS R&D
Funding Update, the NCCAM's FY 2001 budget is $89 million-a 29 percent
increase over last year's and the largest increase of any NIH institute
appropriation for FY 2001.

Results for clinical trials of medical prayer and other distant healing
claims have proven inconsistent and are often criticized for methodology. A
study of distant healing on patients with skin warts published in the April
15, 2000 issue of the American Journal of Medicine (108 (6): 448-52) found
no difference between the group subjected to distant healing and the
control. Healing prayer proponents touted a study by William Harris et al.
in the October 25, 1999, Archives of Internal Medicine (159 (19): 2273-8).
However, in a review of these tests by Jack Tessman and Irwin Tessman for
the March/April 2000 issue of Skeptical Inquirer, the authors concluded that
Harris et al. "failed to show any significant benefit of intercessory
prayer" and found that one of his tests "directly contradicts" earlier
studies by intercessory prayer researcher Randolph C. Byrd.

The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
(CSICOP) is a nonprofit scientific and educational organization, founded in
1976 by Dr. Paul Kurtz. The Skeptical Inquirer is its official journal.
CSICOP encourages the critical investigation of paranormal and
fringe-science claims from a responsible, scientific point of view and
disseminates factual information about the results of such inquiries to the
scientific community and the public.